*obligatory Stormlight plug, this time for the fact that birds aren't native to the area most of the story happens in and at one point someone sees what is obviously a parrot in menagerie and the person showing it off calls it a "rare type of chicken" because there's no other word for "bird" in their language* *and the viewpoint character has never seen an ordinary chicken, either, so the description is... sure something*
Oh, hello author, so you're writing a story in which the heroes lost the final battle? Interesting idea. Are we actually going to hear about what went differently?... Nope, just porn and a smug line about them getting curbstomped. Yeah, okay, in the real world the plucky underdogs probably would lose, but in the book they didn't, and even in the AU they'd been holding their own very well up to the final battle and it's specifically noted everything went the same. This just makes it look like the writer either got lazy or hates the canon or both. Tell me how and why they lost. Setup is good. This is particularly frustrating because the same author feels the need to recap the entire book up to the point of his other fics starting.
Hilariously this is actually real-world relevant today - Japan simply calls chicken meat "tori" ie bird meat, because they don't typically eat any other kinds of birds! (I found this out from my highschool Japanese teacher telling us that there was no way to get turkey in Japan, haha.)
Everyone who writes fanfic involving animals or animalistic beings needs to sit down and write "males do not go into heat" over and over till they remember it.
Males go into rut if they go into anything at all. Also heat/rut in a sophont would likely just result in them being ace whenever they're not in heat/rut. Rut's also likely to result in a lot of trying to have ritualistic 'fights' with other males, like deer locking horns-they aren't trying to cause each other actual physical harm, but they are trying to see who is stronger and also show off for the female deer.
I've always said if ukes go into heat, female characters should go into rut and spend a period of time humping everything in sight and stinking.
yeah, heat happens because there's only one specific time when it's good for an animal to be born, so biology needs to make VERY VERY CERTAIN that mating only happens in a certain timezone that lets that be possible, right? ...in that case it wouldn't really happen in species that had had things like 'indoors' and 'doctors' for a while, right? because civilization and medicine let us cancel out a lot of the factors that mean babies need to be born in spring to get a lot of time to grow before winter comes.
A friend and I were recently having a very silly conversation about "what if A/B/O writers drew more inspiration from real animal behavior" which involved a discussion of an office with two alphas in it going into rut at the same time and everyone groaning and writing off being able to get anything done in the next week because they're going to both come in in, like, tuxedos every day and spend the entire time getting into pissing matches with each other about everything. Sometimes literally, because they both always use the same bathroom stall the other one used last to cover up the other one's smell with theirs.
Funfacts! Literally the first instance of "rut" I ever ran into was in the Black Jewels Trilogy, which meant finding out that it was a real biology thing and not just a Fantasy Plot Device was a weird moment.
I don't remember where I learned it, probably from nature books. I was aware of what a mating season was long before I was aware of what mating was.
Gripe; portraying the blatantly fucking obvious as if it's genius. Yes, it's totally unusually clever to think of tying up a prisoner.
FOR THE RECORD Tolkien actually debated with himself about the potatoes and then decided to put 'em in anyway. …just…in case…anyone was…still thinking about that. >_>
Generic dialogue, especially in porn. If you use identical sentences of dialogue for totally different characters in totally different situations, something is wrong.
Still not enough poetry fic. Also someone went "I would like this better as prose" to one of my narrative poems. Well that's just lovely. Too bad it's never going to be prose ever.
also, brilliant ideas that come out of nowhere and have no logical connection between what your Genius Character would actually know and what they suddenly manage to conclude. being smart doesn't mean you get to know everything your author knows! edit: also smart characters who hold whatever politics their author does, because those are the smartest politics. i've probably been guilty of this myself... but it rankles to see anyone else do it!
